How to Learn from History

When I was a kid, we used to save all of our pop and beer cans. (The beer inside the beer cans were 100% my parents’ property, but once they were empty, and essentially trash, the cans belonged to all of us. There’s some sort of lesson in that, I think.) We would collect them in giant garbage bags for that one time a year when we would drive down to Oregon to visit family, because you were paid something like 25 cents a pound to recycle aluminum in Washington, but in Oregon you could turn in the cans for a refund of the 5-cents-per-can deposit all Oregonians had to pay. We didn’t pay the deposit, but got the refund anyway.

I often suspected that a lot of Washingtonians were drawn to vacation in northern Oregon by that deposit, but only the cheapest Washingtonians, which might have fed into why Oregonians seemed to resent Washingtonians so much.

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